Grand Orange Lodge of Western Canada
BC, AB, SK, MB
Steyn Online http://www.steynonline.com/component/option,com_frontpage/Itemid,33/
America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It
by Mark Steyn
Regnery Publishing, Inc.; ISBN: 0895260786
Hardcover - 256 pages (October 2006
It’s the end of the world as we know it…
Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer from a muezzin. Europeans already are.
And
liberals will still tell you that “diversity is our strength”—while
Talibanic enforcers cruise Greenwich Village burning books and barber
shops, the Supreme Court decides sharia law doesn’t violate the
“separation of church and state,” and the Hollywood Left decides to
give up on gay rights in favor of the much safer charms of polygamy.
If
you think this can’t happen, you haven’t been paying attention, as the
hilarious, provocative, and brilliant Mark Steyn—the most popular
conservative columnist in the English-speaking world—shows to
devastating effect in this, his first and eagerly awaited new book on
American and global politics.
The
future, as Steyn shows, belongs to the fecund and the confident. And
the Islamists are both, while the West—wedded to a multiculturalism
that undercuts its own confidence, a welfare state that nudges it
toward sloth and self-indulgence, and a childlessness that consigns it
to oblivion—is looking ever more like the ruins of a civilization.
Europe,
laments Steyn, is almost certainly a goner. The future, if the West has
one, belongs to America alone—with maybe its cousins in brave
Australia. But America can survive, prosper, and defend its freedom
only if it continues to believe in itself, in the sturdier virtues of
self-reliance (not government), in the centrality of family, and in the
conviction that our country really is the world’s last best hope.
Steyn
argues that, contra the liberal cultural relativists, America should
proclaim the obvious: we do have a better government, religion, and
culture than our enemies, and we should spread America’s influence
around the world—for our own sake as well as theirs.
Mark Steyn’s America Alone is laugh-out-loud funny—but it will also change the way you look at the world. It is sure to be the most talked-about book of the year.
Thomas Scott's Body
by J.M. Bumstead, Professor of History, University of Manitoba
http://www.umanitoba.ca/publications/uofmpress/books/0887556450.html
Two essays within the book, Thomas Scott's Body and Why Shoot Thomas Scott? might be of interest to the Western Canadian Orangeman. The late Brother Scott has not been treated too kind by shoddy historians or apologists and sympathizers of Louis Riel and it is not uncommon to find them demonizing Scott's character in order to, somehow, give justification to his murder. Bumstead stresses chronology and documentation in his writings and challenges the objectiveness of some who don't. An interesting read on the torturous murder of Brother Scott and the indignification of his body afterwards. By the standards of that period, Riel and his accomplices deserved to hang for those actions alone.
Curse of the Red Cross Ring
An good yarn based on fact, superstition and old wives tales. The authour knows next to nothing about the Orange Order, (hence his claim that the Red Cross degree is the highest of the Orange Order, when in fact it is a degree of the Royal Black Knights) but it is nevertheless an enjoyable read that takes the reader back to an earlier period of Newfoundland. The Orange Order has, and still does, play a significant social and cultural role in Newfoundland society which still has many Loyal Orange Lodge's and Royal Black Preceptories.
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
By James Webb. For summary click here and here